


Always & Forever

by Ncj700



Series: Love Somebody AU [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bombing Attacks, F/M, Fire, In-Universe Terrorism, Mentions of Extremism, Soulmate AU, Soulmate Dystopia?, the soulmate au nobody asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:48:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22577329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ncj700/pseuds/Ncj700
Summary: Six months after Keith turned sixteen, it happened. A light tint started appearing on his right wrist, and a warm tingle began to dance across his skin. The colour bled darker for weeks until it formed visible scrawl, marked and burned into his existence, and Keith felt like the world had fallen.~*~Katie’s mark had started coming in before her birthday, and had cleared into words the day after the celebration; the tentative excitement had been broken by mixed feelings of its tingling appearance on the skin of her left wrist. Besides the unusual—and bad luck—placement on her left wrist, the words that appeared didn’t fill her or her parents with any joy. Maybe if they had been better, less ominous, they might have thought her lucky.
Relationships: Colleen Holt/Sam Holt, Keith & Pidge | Katie Holt, Keith's Father/Krolia (Voltron), Keith/Pidge | Katie Holt, Krolia/Thace (Voltron), Matt Holt & Romelle, Matt Holt/Romelle
Series: Love Somebody AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1624501
Comments: 22
Kudos: 86





	Always & Forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LuceCiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuceCiel/gifts).



> Please be aware of the elements that will occur in this series. The following stories and chapters in the rest of this series will contain and/or mention certain types opf graphic content that some people may not be comfortable with, which will be listed in the series notes.
> 
> This story is rated M, as the whole series will be, due to these themes. There is no graphic content in this story, though there is mention of minor character death.

When Keith was seven years old, he didn’t really have a great perception of the world. 

Fort Garritt was a small town so remote that it needed drops of supplies flown in from Marmora and Reiphod, each over four hundred miles from the small, desert settlement, twice a week. He went to a tiny school, which would have around four to five classes depending on town requirements each year, covering every function from the town nursery to high school education.

He had five other classmates total. For most of his early schooling, he just remembered bumping elbows with them when he was writing, because everyone else used their right hand That and whacking his head on the teacher’s desk and bawling his eyes out when he and James were playing on the swivel chair, and James spun the thing too fast. 

That tiny class was the centre of his universe.

A year later, moving into the next class there were another six or seven students in the more advanced levels of education, most of whom he already knew anyway. Those three years were filled with scoldings for _‘exploring’_ in the middle of the day and earning themselves chronic sunburns, or _‘helping’_ in his mum’s scrap metal-cross-mechanics business.

It wasn't until he reached the third class, a mix between eleven to thirteen-year-olds, that Keith started thinking that the world was a bigger place than the Caylum Desert and the north western Karthulian mountains beyond that had been the backdrop of all his sunsets and stargazing trips.

That was when, in preparation for the higher curriculum, the school started sending out letters to the parents, asking permission to proceed with sex-ed and soul-ed classes. His teachers had more or less herded everyone in the room around the old TV, and turned on the DVD player for the first of those days.

Aside from being mortified out of his mind when he realised all those accidental moments he’d walked in on his parents in the scrapyard shed had not in fact been ‘ _I’m just checking your Pa’s leg for a bruise honey, why don’t you go see if your friends want to go for a dip in the park pool?_ ’ and variations thereof, Keith found himself kind of boggled.

Not just with the subject of human procreation and all the weird stuff that went with that, but the idea that somewhere in the world, someone was going to get a faint outline on their wrist of the first words he would ever speak to them, before he met them, or even knew what they would be.

He could be standing right next to someone, talking on the phone, or through a message, have heard them talking to other people, have known them for years in passing, but until he spoke to them directly, he would have no idea who they would be. Only when they spoke to him, directly, singularly, deliberately, audibly, would his own mark fade, and reveal their identity as his Soulmate.

It was kind of annoying that everyone already knew more than he did about his supposed soulmate though, just because of his handwriting; he knew that whichever wrist his soulmate had their mark on was the one he would write with, but it was _weird_.

The science/P.E teacher who had taken them all for the excruciatingly embarrassing talks and DVD videos had said some mumbo jumbo about it being Fate’s way of guiding people, a way for them to know where to look for words of their own on another’s wrist when the time came. 

But apparently he was weird, because left-wrist soulmarks were rare, and so, in the style of small town gossip that could never truly be replicated anywhere else, absolutely _everyone_ had an opinion on it.

Adeel Rizavi from the corner shop swore up and down that his left-handedness meant he was was lucky—‘ _Your special someone’s gonna go far kid!_ ’—but Mitch Iverson, who ran the hover-biking club, assured him that was not the case—‘ _More likely you’ll never meet them kid, most lefties never do_ ’—and just made him even more fed up of the whole thing. 

He did get to see his dad shout at Iverson though, and it was kinda funny watching the off-grid racing instructor turn the same colour as a prune. His mum told him to forget about what anyone else said, and for the most part, he did. 

He got so sick of all the commentary that he made himself learn to write right-handed, and soothed his worries about his words with the stories his parents told him about their words, which had appeared and disappeared in moments. 

He kind of figured it would be someone from school anyway. Like his mum and dad, who had grown up together the same way Keith went hunting fossils, sneaking out of history to dive bomb the park pool, and picking cactus fruit with James, Ryan, Nadia, Hunk, and Ina.

His dad had turned sixteen first, scratchy letters appearing on his wrist for an instant; at first, he’d been heartbroken until his teachers and parents had told him that meant they had already been spoken. 

No one else had been sixteen at the time though, so it wasn’t until two years, and a couple of tumbles in the backseat of his mother’s car later that they figured it out; _‘Good thing too because two months after that we found out you were coming in a stork delivery kid!_ ’ his father had added. 

Once, he confessed to Ryan when they’d been pulled into detention for something dumb that he hoped whoever got his words, they had as funny and good a story as his parents’ to tell when they finally met.

Something else happened that year besides the grudging acknowledgement of inevitable puberty and the encroach of adulthood to follow it; it was also the same year that the ‘ _fancy_ ’ restaurant (which was really just a diner, but was still the only go-to for birthday parties, weekend junk food and ‘ _can’t be bothered cooking_ ’ nights) was set on fire about two months after his eleventh birthday.

Sal’s was a nice place, and they guy who owned it was a good guy; once a hardline Bond Purist who reformed his mindset after the Marchanda Riots over bond purism laws began. Despite his changes mindset he had been a local supporter of bond purism and had gone to great lengths to discredit and malign those who wanted reform, including those with traditional soulbonds who supported it, and had made an unpleasant name for himself for several years.

He came into the school to talk about it, about why he had been wrong, and went to other places to support reform charities and protest rallies, but according to the video that appeared on the Internet his attempt to mollify his actions and change those ways, weren’t enough to undo ‘ _damage already done_ ’.

He had been targeted, and everyone else just happened to be nearby. It was a horrific event twenty years later, Keith still wasn’t sure the town had fully recovered from.

Firefighters managed to stop it from spreading, but the chef and a lot of customers died, or were badly injured. His dad was one of them, and one of his classmates. And Hunk’s mother. Keith’s dad had been part of the local voluntary team that kept it under control before reinforcements and support could be flown in from Reiphod.

Even then, Reiphod’s bigger station had to call in a special team to help find the arsonist who started it, bringing waves of men and women in suits from the north coast with fancy scanners and data-pads.

The arson teams found the woman responsible (someone who called herself Trugg). She had over twenty burned out buildings behind her, and nearly forty people injured or dead as a result. 

There had been an additional twenty one people dead or injured in the Fort Garritt arson case. It didn’t sound like much compared to some global disasters, natural or otherwise, but for a tiny town that barely counted into triple digit population figures, it was a fifth of the population. It ripped his home apart.

The story had been all over the national news, because it was the first time the unknown arsonists, whose attacks had been steadily growing all across the country, had targeted a civilian area, and it was the first time they had used zaiforge bombs as a weapon. 

Then there was the inevitable local gossip; Ina had seen the arsonist outside the building before the fire, so she had to go with her parents to testify. 

The arsonist had been caught because her hovercar had been in his mum’s garage after breaking down, and she hadn’t been able to get out of town thanks to the surrounding heat trap, so he had to stop with Hunk and his family when she went too.

In the end justice had been dealt; Trugg Post was charged with Arson, twenty-three Murder counts, and seventeen counts of Grievious Bodily Harm, and given a life sentence. It was later appealed by the town to be changed to a death sentence, and after it went to court again, the judge ruled in favour of the sentence being changed. 

It didn’t really change anything though; the damage had been done. There were ten families at the cremation for the victims, Keith and his mother included. Trugg being arrested or given a death sentence, while vindicating, didn’t change his new reality.

His dad was dead. 

That year, the days of making time-capsules with soul-word guesses, buried in the park, homemade fireworks, midnight camping, and obliviousness to life beyond the desert were over. 

Life wasn’t quite the same after that. It was weird coming home from school and not hearing his dad’s old music blaring from the speakers in the shop, or finding his fire vest hanging up behind the door. 

It was hard walking past the burned-out diner in the morning, past the post office without seeing Mrs Galuvao’s green post van sitting waiting as she collected the twice weekly drop–offs from Thace, and his class size had shrunk by three. One girl and her brother had been badly burned in the attack, and were in hospital for weeks for surgery. Seok Jin Jang didn’t come back to school at all.

It took a few years to get used to the new normal, but eventually, it was easier. Keith didn’t know what he was pushing for in his school work, but he tried harder, trained with the outdoor activities club, and kept in shape. His mum started seeing the guy who ran the landing strip, Thace Wingert, and eventually, he moved in.

He was a good guy. He never tried to replace his dad, but Keith liked him, and they were close. He helped him with his science revision, and taught him how to fly off-grid as learned a bit of mechanics from his mum, and looked at the career day handout leaflets which started going around with him when Keith decided to show more of an interest in his future.

Moving into the final class, and his last years of school, he’d more or less decided to join police training. His dad had been a fireman, and his justice had been delivered by the arsonist teams. 

Keith didn’t think he could do the same thing (even if he did use his dad’s old hover-bike for off-grid racing with his friends). He wasn’t that kind of brave, but he could help stop the people who contradicted the kindness and bravery they—and his father—exemplified.

Then, about six months after he turned sixteen, after a summer of off-grid racing, trying to train James’ dog to sniff out his soulmate after too much to drink, and learning how not to fumble midnight kisses at the canyon drop with Acxa, before the start of exam season, it happened.

A light tint started appearing on his right wrist, and a warm tingle began to dance across his skin. The colour bled darker for weeks until it formed visible scrawl, marked and burned into his existence, and Keith felt like the world had fallen for a second time.

He didn’t remember exactly when he noticed that the mark had become clear, but unlike his other friends who bore their words in excitement, or showed them proudly, Keith covered his, hid them beneath his fingerless racing gloves. His friends teased him about rude words, and he let them make their jokes.

The only people he had shown them to were his mother, and reluctantly, Acxa and Hunk. They had known known him better than to believe the calm, forced agreements with James’ jokes about innuendos and bad pick-up lines about the plea branded onto his skin.

Hunk had cornered him after school that day, and later, after a fly on the bike to the canyon drop for privacy, Acxa had asked him why he lied to James about them; he’d told them both how much they terrified him.

**‘ _Please don’t hurt me!_ ’ **

What kind of person was he going to become if that was the first thing he’d ever hear from his supposed soul-mate?

‘ _You know it’s not that black and white. I mean, I’ve heard Hunk say that when Mr Cree brings the maths results out. It might not be what you’re scared it is,_ ’ 

She had a point; Hunk’s aversion to Klaizap’s trigonometry exams aside, Keith had been told by his mother and Thace for years not to put too much stock in his words, but it was hard not to. Especially when someone from the bond registry council came into the school every term to ‘ _check on him_ ’. 

‘ _Our words are of our own making, and until they happen no-one knows how it’s going to happen. You can’t predict them being anything specific,_ ’ she insisted. ‘ _If they bother you that much, just make sure whatever the reason someone says them is, it’s something you can live with. Just don’t regret anything._ ’ 

The words had reassured him. Not long after that, Acxa had got her words, but there was no promise of affection in them, and he’d returned the reassurance. He reminded her that just because they had a mystical connection with a stranger, it didn’t mean you had to love them. 

Nadia and Hunk’s dads’ didn’t have matching words, after all; Adeel had shared words with a pen-pal from Nalquod (in another county over a thousand miles away) that he’d met in college, and Iosefa had been soulmates with Hunk’s mother first. They’d married about thirty years before the fire.

It seemed to help, and as he reassured her, Keith tried to take it as a comfort for the burning words branded beneath his gloves.

That year, after finishing the bare minimum of exams he needed to finish high school, he applied to the police training academy in Marchanda; Iverson and Klaizap both gave him recommendations, and the assessments from the soulbond council woman were fine, but Keith was sure it was only Iverson’s recommendation—his ability to drive completely off grid—which made the examiners overlook his words despite his good results. 

The skill was so unique and sought after now that the police were willing to recruit a potential abuser or murderer just in case they lucked out.

He was in though, and from there things went from strength to strength, culminating when he was included in the group of limited police students allowed to assist the detectives working on the Kraydah Bombing crime scene when the attack in the Niloofar town occurred. 

The attack in Kraydah announced the Fire of Purification to the world, the propaganda following it claiming multiple attacks in the past few years, including the one that had devastated his home; amongst the gloom, he met an Altean woman named Romelle, a Forensic trainee at one of Marchanda’s elite universities, who soon became his second best-friend after Hunk in the relative unknown of the Terran capital.

They only shared classes for the first few months, but it was enough for them to remain in close contact when her own forensic training took precedent, and Keith decided to take on a behavioural analysis course being offered to new recruits by the National Crimes Department. They even shared a dodgy flat for a while when combined funds were more cost effective as they both dove head first into all their training.

He pursued the basic instruction in investigation techniques, dealing with crime scenes, handling fugitives, interrogations, paperwork, and anything that remotely sounded like it would be useful in dealing with Purificationists to broaden his pool of knowledge. 

Keith knew he couldn't learn _everything_ , but a few extra courses beside his main focus wasn't going to hurt, even if it kept him from having much of a social life, but Romelle was just as bad; her only deviation from all the medical courses and examination classes being her Soul Meet. He spent so much time on out-of-town courses, including one with the NCD, or they had such horrific timetables, he felt like he hardly saw his friend.

Keith been invited to her wedding, and he had wanted to go, but had been sent out on a team to work with the NCD on a case in Pollux, on the other side of the country.

With the stress of the Inspector’s exam approaching, he had wanted some good cases and experience to back up his application and make up for his terrible social graces, and it had been a limited time chance to work with the arson teams in senior law enforcement, and make a good impression for when he submitted the application. 

He’d apologised, and sent along well wishes and some presents to make up for it and while he knew Romelle had been disappointed, she understood why he wanted to focus on his career so much.

Romelle hadn’t seen his words, and didn’t know he was left-handed, but she did know that they were the dubious kind, and that if he’d had one blip out of place on his school record, he’d never have made even as a street officer, off-grid flyer or not.

She knew that until he was sure the words weren't something he’d caused, a result of his actions or inactions, he needed to be their opposite. If his words implied he would end up causing harm for a complete stranger, then he would make sure to do the opposite and help people instead.

So, he worked hard, pushed and forced his way through training, the cases, and studied for the Inspectors’ exam after he got back with the same dogged persistence (literally—he couldn't sign up to become a member of the dog squad, but after concerned friends had urged him to get a pet he did his best to train a large puppy he’d named Kosmo with help from one of the team members) that had made him want to somewhat follow in his father’s footsteps, long before his words appeared.

Most of his friends were in his unit or from the station, but that didn’t bother him. It was hard enough just trying to stay in contact with Romelle outside of the office and labs; her third anniversary of her soulmeet (and wedding), and he _still_ hadn’t met her husband (though from what little he’d heard, Matt sounded like a decent guy).

Regris sometimes dragged him out for drinks and he met a few people, but he wasn’t interested in anything too lasting. He was happy as things were, and only the ominous words hidden beneath his gloves cast a shadow on the relatively peaceful success in his life.

But even soulmarks could be ignored; as days and months and years passed without incident, Keith almost managed to forget his words had appeared at all.

* * *

Katie had never considered herself particularly advantaged, but she wasn’t ignorant either. Her father was a billionaire, and that gave her more privileges than any one person reasonably needed.

Her schools had been fancy, expensive private ones, with good science courses, and her college had been just as reputable. Those old colleges that harkened back to the founding days of education, with fees to match unless your brain made up for a lack of money.

Katie was one of the rare few who fell into both categories. She didn’t take the scholarships though—‘ _better left for students without that luxury of choice_ ’—her mother said, and Katie agreed. When her application to Marchanda University was accepted, on top of her own fees, her parents joined the scholarship as sponsors instead.

It had still been a firm foundation for her to take on her apprenticeship in micro-technology; she had just hoped for something different from her father’s company and—as much as she loved them—the constraints of her family.

The urban east coast, specifically Marchanda, had been an exciting place to grow up. There were plenty of technology fairs, live-streams, eBooks, old culture festivals and general entertainment to keep young analytical minds entertained, and the family escape to the lake house in Bluve during the holiday periods always made her appreciate what her life, and the luck fate had made available to her.

Busy and non-stop, but peaceful all the same, until she turned sixteen. 

Katie had grown up with the same anticipation of her words as all her classmates, wondering if they would be obvious, easy to trace, mysterious and vague or utterly bemusing and random. The closer the time came, the more she researched them, the famous soulbonds from history and the different ones that science had identified. 

Besides her sixteenth birthday itself, it was an occasion that marked her a step closer to adulthood, like a new chapter was starting. It was an important event no matter how she chose to incorporate them into her life. 

She could find herself better suited to a platonic soulbond, like her parents; her dad’s was another technology whiz who now led his research and development laboratories, and her mother’s was one of her co-workers at the horticultural biology centre she worked at. They had both met through their working careers, and through those symbiotic relationships, each other.

Or she might want a relationship more traditionally aligned, like Matt, her older brother, who had been given nothing but a price written on his wrist that had him a nervous wreck at every cashier transaction he undertook, waiting for someone, anyone to call out ‘ _That’s six-sixty-nine for take-out,_ ’ for ten years before he met his wife.

Katie’s mark had started coming in before her birthday, and had cleared into words the day after the celebration; the tentative excitement had been broken by mixed feelings of its tingling appearance on the skin of her left wrist, and the effects thereafter.

Besides the unusual—and bad luck, to those who were superstitious—placement on her left wrist instead of the right, the words that appeared didn’t fill her or her parents with any excitement or joy. Maybe if they had been better, less ominous, they might have thought her lucky. 

Lots of famous historical figures had been dealt left-handed words, literally, and they’d done things like head the first empires, lead revolutions, bring down fascists, and deconstruct the misconceptions that had once been plagued upon the world (some of them still were).

They weren’t always like hers, but she hadn’t been so fortunate, and while Katie had been content enough to forget about her words, unconcerned with the implications, her parents had developed very different ideas. 

She hadn't really noticed the concerns until after the spring holidays, when her parents started encouraging her to use word-covering jewellery and accessories to keep them concealed, or, more telling, the kind, bulky man that not long after became her shadow.

Her bodyguard’s name was Takashi Shirogane (‘ _Shiro is fine, please, Miss Holt!_ ’), and he was a former competitive martial artist who had been forced to retire after a hover-car accident had left him with a mechanical prosthesis. He was a nice guy. Married. He and his husband Curtis were adopting, which was why his eventual co-worker had been taken on.

Trying to adopt was more likely to work when one of the hopeful parents wasn’t hovering after a young adult twenty-four hours a day, five days a week (plus occasional weekends) because people presumed her incapable of taking care of herself. Honestly, Katie was sure at the age of twenty-one that it was still just an overreaction.

 **‘ _You’re safe now._ ’**

The words had conjured nothing but worry in her parents. Katie felt they could be anything; a car accident, some kind of medical emergency, a natural disaster, a joke. So, she didn't put too much stock in the idea of the words printed on her skin as a sign of danger. 

She just wished her parents could believe that, or trust her gut feeling, but they didn’t. For all the intelligence she had, graduating high school early, acing all her university acceptance exams mere months after her words appeared, for as proud as her parents were, they didn’t trust her judgement on what fate’s plans for her might be.

‘ _Were we less financially privileged, I would be more inclined to think the same,_ ’ her father said, when frustration and the need for independence had started driving her up the wall. ‘ _But there have been security problems in the past._ ’

Aside from just driving her to school, Shiro followed her around the grounds. He was there whenever she wanted to go into the city with her friends for something as stupid and simple as a bad comedy at the cinema. Or a day out to the nature reserves or beach. Or down to the food district for the good take-away. He was _always_ there.

She’d been followed around her school dance even when she tried to sneak away with then-girlfriend Narti by her ever present shadow, and that was when she finally had enough; Narti had been uncomfortable from the beginning, and the growing tension had come to a head that night.

Her last school social event, and her girlfriend broke up with her because of the man her father paid to watch her every move. 

‘S _ince we do have some luxuries, your mother and I would rather err on the side of caution; I know it’s frustrating sweetheart, but I promise it won’t be forever_.’

‘ _It’s not frustrating, it’s invasive and suffocating dad! I don’t want this!_ ’ she’d snarled. ‘ _I can’t even have a social life anymore!_ _How long is_ ‘it won’t be forever’ _supposed to be? What happens if I never meet my soulmate?_ ’ she’d raged with all the teenage dramatics she’d possessed and never before used. ‘ _You can’t have me followed for the rest of my life!_ ’

Five years later, Katie still wasn’t sure if her parents had taken that as a challenge or not. 

She had refused to speak to her parents for a month after that incident, unless forced to by things that still required their consent. Like when her college acceptance letters had come, and she’d wanted to go south-west, to Niloofar (as far away as possible from Marchanda). She’d liked the sound of Kraydah’s Technological Institute, though the prospect of finally moving away from home would have drawn her to any university that accepted her.

At first her parents had been wary, but supportive, almost excited for the idea. Then there was a bombing at Kraydah’s bond registration centre, which killed forty people, and was immediately followed by a message from an extremist—no, terrorist—group calling themselves Purificationists, who stated their intention to cleanse governments worldwide—though most of the attacks had been situated in Terra—by fire of soul-based ideology, and listed all of their previous ‘ _achievements_ ’ towards that goal. 

They had changed their minds immediately. It was too dangerous. She didn’t know the area, they reasoned. There was no-one in the family there to help her if she needed it. It was too far away if something happened. In their minds, it was everything her parents had tried to shield her from since the day those cursed words formed on her skin.

She’d tried to talk them into letting her go to Pollux instead—‘ _It's not that far from the lake house, and the uni is just as good as Kraydah!_ ’—but even that didn’t inspire any reassurance when there was a Purificationist attack there too.

In the end, she had turned down the unconditional acceptance letters to both advanced bachelors degrees, and hadn’t spoken to her parents for another month when the only University they were comfortable with was Marchanda’s.

Katie knew if she had really wanted to, she could have applied for early emancipation, and pursued her education on her own. She had savings, or could have applied for scholarships, and was more than capable of looking after herself regardless of how privileged her upbringing had been, but she hesitated to go that far. 

Before her words had appeared, her parents only cared for and loved her. Even with the addition of Shiro, aside from those changes in her life, nothing else had changed much. They hadn't tried to _stop_ her from pursuing what she wanted, just where, and not out of a bad place. She felt the same concern when arson attacks started showing on the notification services more frequently, in all honesty, and when they started popping up in Marchanda too, she sort of understood, but she was sick of her words being the controlling force in her life.

Her parents weren’t monsters; they were just worried, and they didn’t stop her from moving out when the constraint of her home life grew intolerable. Her father had just made sure that Shiro had a room he could use (which was really only when he needed to stop overnight), and that the penthouse she’d rented was in a safe, high security building.

It would probably be a lie to say she was grateful for some of their decisions in her teenage years, but university was a temper on her anger.

She met Romelle in her Drule language classes. Both of them had taken it just to satisfy the term requirements, and they hit it off quickly. Romelle was halfway through her medical training to become a forensic scientist and coroner, already in placement within Marchanda’s police department. She’d even been at the investigation in Kraydah.

Despite only having one class together, she became a fast friend and mixed well into Katie’s limited social circle. She never complained about being followed by the gentle giant who was still an ever present shadow, and through her, Katie met her cousin, Allura, who was also in the medical field (whose chosen field had been for living people, not dead ones).

University, the chance to live away from home was a breath of fresh air in her life, a taste of something too familiar and forgotten at the same time; a chance to breathe, to have her own space, and have some control in her life.

She had some independence, a bit more privacy, and she was studying microtech. Mostly, she had a social life again. Her romantic adventures still weren't great, but she had friends who didn't get weirded out by an adult following them all the time. She suspected that was because Allura and Romelle were older than her, a more mature twenty to her almost-seventeen, but it was invaluable. 

Marchanda University wasn’t her first choice, or even her second, but she was still doing what she loved and wanted, and she felt good again and for a while, Katie forgot about her words until, about six months after starting university, she and her brother made their way down to the coffee shop where Romelle worked. 

They had been planning to meet up after her shift to catch a film the local cinema with Allura and Vrek (one of Katie’s classmates from her microtech course). Those plans had been upended when Romelle took over from the cashier for a moment and blurted out ‘ _That’s six-sixty-nine for take-out,_ ’ and her brother, idiot that he was, screamed out an overjoyed ‘ _Finally!_ ’ in response.

Good to know her brother was just as full-on in his fate-ordained meeting with his soulmate as he was in their weekly _Kill-Bot Phantasm: ReLOADED!!_ contests.

For all the joy of her brother’s rapid, but heartfelt happiness with Romelle, culminating in their wedding just under two years later at the family lake house in Bluve (where Romelle bemoaned the missed chance to set her up with a single friend from the police department), it was still easier to pretend she’d never seen her words, to cover them with her sleeves or bracelets so she didn’t have to look at them.

It gave her a bit more faith though; if fate saw fit to bring her brother and Romelle together, with their equally obscure, and oft-thought hopeless sounding words, surely she might just have a chance too. She wasn’t sure what kind of soulmate she wanted, but the chance to meet them would be nice, and that was a start.

When the time came in her degree to take a work placement, she had initially considered working with a tech company on the other side of the city. Small. Relatively unobtrusive, and unknown. It would have been good, a change of pace.

Then she thought better of it, and just applied to her father’s company, if only to save herself the arguments and pleas that would surely accompany any other decision. Sending off the paperwork, she couldn't help but feel suffocated still by the three words that had outlined her future, and wonder if safety was worth the frustration that had followed them.

* * *

You can all thank LuceCiel for this. I found a long comatose brain child of hers in our DM history looking for Roads Untravelled stuff, on the 10th August 2019 and now…. Well, I brought it back from the dead with Mary-Shelly-Style writing necromancy, and now this land of suffering exists. 

There are forty-five chapters so I thought it would be safe to upload this as a series  ~~Those of you wondering why Sugar Sugar Honey Honey hasn’t updated for 6 months? This. This is why.~~

This chapter is just an introduction, but from the next chapter onwards I will only offer one piece of advice before continuing: heed the tags my friends. SERIOUSLY. _HEED THE TAGS AND WARNING NOTES_. Say it with me guys, **' _HEED THE TAGS AND WARNING NOTES._ '** They’re there for a reason, that being your own personal welfare. The rest of the series will include a variety of unpleasant themes & scenarios up to and including:

–Kidnapping  
–Blackmail/extortion  
–Psychological manipulation and torture  
–classical psychological conditioning methods  
–Intimidation  
–Physical torture resulting in disfigurement  
–Threats/intention/attempts of disfigurement  
–General physical abuse  
–Sensory deprivation  
–Non-consensual drug use  
–Panic attacks and conditions such as PTSD.  
–Emotional disassociation, especially regarding the resident psychopath  
–Attempted/temporary/minor Suffocation and burning.  
–Unwanted personal space and privacy invasion  
–Terrorism  
–Arson

…and there is probably more, which I will add to and give warning of if needed. If anyone who perseveres finds something I haven’t covered, let me know, and I’ll add it to the list.

I will confirm straight up that though there will be side mentions and concerns of it, that this story will NOT contain any sexual abuse or assault, or Main Character Death. Those are about the only things I can say with absolute certainty are NOT in this story.

I will do my best to warn people and provide TL;DRs for each chapter if needed, but if you want to read this story, but please, PLEASE, know that these factors and themes will be playing a large role in it and follow your own judgement on what does or does not make you uncomfortable.

If you don't, and find the contents of this story upsetting or uncomfortable... then frankly  IDK what to tell you.  You have been warned. This series is tagged mature for a reason.  Again, I will do my best to provide warnings and summaries when these issues come up, but please take your own experiences into account and use your own judgement as the story progresses to decide whether or not you are comfortable in continuing. 

I will also say straight up that this story WILL have a happy ending too; for those of you who forge ahead, or like a darker kind of story or twist on an old trope, I hope this ticks those boxes. 

This hits two genres that I rarely write, mostly because of preference. I can't stand watching Crime dramas (it's bad enough horrible people exist I don't want to watch it when im trying to relax lol) so working on something so opposing to my personal taste has been challenging, but so much fun because of that.

Thank you to KDXArt (a grammar saving _Goddess_ , other words are an insult to her powers) for looking over this chapter, Luce-Ciel (co-conspirator and plot wrangler and 50% guilty for the creation of the warning list), and Fairia (writers block support) for their encouragement while I was writing this over the past few months.

If you like music to go with your fic, there is a playlist for this story [here.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/481nF4APvHuL2mIYrpyQUc?si=74G7P5WeTqKR449dVt81fg)

This series will continue with two stories each reflecting the same storyline, so please subscribe to that, as there will be multiple stories in this AU to follow! I think I’ve covered everything, so with that all done, onwards with the soulmate AU! 

~~What happened to our Kidge~~ ~~fluff? What have I done?~~ ~~I'm so sorry~~


End file.
